[HN Gopher] Why host your own LLM?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Why host your own LLM?
        
       Author : andy99
       Score  : 215 points
       Date   : 2023-08-15 13:06 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (marble.onl)
 (TXT) w3m dump (marble.onl)
        
       | rig666 wrote:
       | I host an LLM because it's cheaper for my use case. To many
       | people focus on how an LLM interfaces with users but I believe
       | the best most reliable use for an LLM is for analyzing free form
       | text and having it put that data into quantifiable fields or
       | tagging. Things like this would have taken an interns or overseas
       | laborers weeks to months to do can now finally be automated.
        
         | wcedmisten wrote:
         | How accurate is an LLM for this task? I was thinking of using
         | one for analyzing free form PDF text to find a specific
         | element, but I was worried about hallucinations.
        
           | Aerroon wrote:
           | Won't you run out of context size though? The older models
           | only went up to 2000 tokens, newer ones up to 16k.
           | 
           | Ie how do you feed the LLM the text along with your question
           | without it forgetting most of the text? I assume the text you
           | want to feed it is longer than 16,000 words.
        
           | halflings wrote:
           | Extractive tasks are part of where LLMs shine, and where you
           | get the least amount of hallucination as long as you fine-
           | tune your model.
           | 
           | By fine-tuning the model to extract a specific desired output
           | from the text you give it, it learns that the output always
           | comes from the input, and so you get less random outputs than
           | just by prompting an instruction-tuned model (which was fine-
           | tuned to find the answer in its weights, instead of copying
           | it from the input).
        
             | wcedmisten wrote:
             | I'm pretty ignorant on which is the best self hosted LLM
             | for such a task or how to fine-tune it. Do you know of any
             | resources on how to set that up?
             | 
             | It seems like llama2 is the biggest name on HN when it
             | comes to self hosting but I have no idea how it actually
             | performs.
        
         | celestialcheese wrote:
         | Exactly this. It's so fast to spin up classifiers now when it
         | used to take weeks to get something working.
         | 
         | What LLMs are you using?
        
         | hubraumhugo wrote:
         | Absolutely, just look at the number of manual data entry jobs
         | on Upwork. IMO one of the superpowers of LLMs is not generating
         | text or images, it's understanding and transforming
         | unstructured data.
        
         | unshavedyak wrote:
         | I've had a similar thought. I want to feed LLMs (and friends)
         | messy data from my house and let it un-mess as best it can. A
         | big hurdle in managing home data (chat logs, emails, browser
         | history, etc) is making use of it. i don't want to have to tag
         | all of my data. LLMs seem really attractive for that to me.
         | 
         | I have this urge to toy with the idea but i also find "Prompt
         | Engineering" to be very unattractive. It feels like something
         | i'd have to re-tailor towards any new model i change to. Not
         | very re-usable and difficult to make "just work".
        
           | vilaca wrote:
           | Thank you for this hint. I have saved a history file from a
           | remote session i did yesterday, some interesting stuff there
           | but also a lot of clutter from all the mistakes I did and
           | asking the free chatgpt to unclutter it for me just made it a
           | lot easier to read and went from 133 lines to 39 lines with
           | added comments and line spacing.
           | 
           | It's not perfect but it removed a lot of useless stuff like
           | all the times i mistyped '--recurse-submodules' or the times
           | I went into a folder only to realize it was not the correct
           | folder for what I was trying to do.
        
           | eterps wrote:
           | > I want to feed LLMs (and friends) messy data from my house
           | and let it un-mess as best it can.
           | 
           | What would be your goal for doing that?
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | To then be able to have secondary steps of lookup. I often
             | want a search engine for "my life". Most commonly from text
             | messages where i discussed something. In a perfect world it
             | would be able to link context between emails, browser
             | history, chat conversations, etc. I'd love a flexible
             | system that could record what i have in boxes, in the
             | fridge, etc.
             | 
             | Sounds a bit silly, but of course it's mostly just for fun.
             | However on the more practical side, i do often find myself
             | needing to dig through old text conversations trying to
             | find that one message. Not having a flexible, deep search
             | behind it sucks. I often find myself wanting to do the same
             | with my browser history. Find that one website i visited,
             | etc.
             | 
             | I have the thought that it would be great to make my data
             | points more rich. Don't just tag my browser history with
             | isolated tags, such as Programming, Rust, etc - but infer
             | meaning from my searching. Be able to see that i'm working
             | on ProjectX actively via CLI Git activity, and that i'm
             | searching for Y. Be able to correlate commit Z with search
             | Y. etcetc
             | 
             | It feels to me there's a ton of small, edge case utility
             | that can be gained by dumping everything to a local server
             | and having it link the data. But i don't want to do any of
             | that manually.
             | 
             | Likewise, i've wanted to manage "Home Inventory" before -
             | what's in boxes, etc. Managing that myself is tedious,
             | though. LLMs seem ripe for figuring out associations - even
             | dumb LLMs. My hope is that i eventually can start wiring
             | things together and having the LLMs start making rich data
             | out of messy untagged data.
             | 
             | Would be neat, /shrug
        
               | BillyTheKing wrote:
               | have you heard of rewind.ai? it sounds like it might be a
               | possible solution for what you're looking for (not
               | affiliated with it though, and also don't have it on my
               | Mac, so not sure how well it works in reality)
        
               | mickelsen wrote:
               | Just leaving this, there was an effort to build a truly
               | open source one: https://github.com/dhamaniasad/cytev2
        
               | unshavedyak wrote:
               | Yea, though it's not local. They claim it is, but then
               | use ChatGPT .. which is odd.
               | 
               | Personally i want to build a fairly dumb system though.
               | Ie make a system which can be useful with LLama2 13B or
               | w/e. Something that doesn't require state of the art
               | GPT4+.
               | 
               | If that means compromising on some features that's fine,
               | but at least then it can be truly and fully local.
        
               | LTL_FTC wrote:
               | This would be truly great. I have been pushing back the
               | task of itemizing all of my belongings into a spreadsheet
               | in the event of a natural disaster/fire/theft and having
               | an assistant that I could say, "I have this road bike I
               | built" and have it look through my emails and gather all
               | the components and associated costs, then add it to a
               | spreadsheet, would be a boon to many people. Of course,
               | having it do it automagically from my purchases would be
               | even better.
        
           | rig666 wrote:
           | Ya prompt engineering can be a more difficult than it looks.
           | Especially when dealing with less intelligent models. That's
           | why I recommend having an error checking stage were the model
           | gives a model should be able to return a simple "True" or
           | "Yes" when presented it's last response. This eats up more
           | GPU time but the signal to noise ratio improves drastically.
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | > That's why I recommend having an error checking stage
             | were the model gives a model should be able to return a
             | simple "True" or "Yes" when presented it's last response.
             | 
             | Mind elaborating on that? Looks like a typo but i'm having
             | difficulty knowing for sure. Thanks!
        
             | siquick wrote:
             | Would also be interested in learning more about this
        
         | jackthetab wrote:
         | I assume asking for "quantifiable fields" is akin to requesting
         | "return the data in JSON format", yes?
         | 
         | How do you do the tagging bits, though?
        
         | victorbjorklund wrote:
         | What type of analysis do you do on the text? And how is the
         | performance/cost of running vs more specialized models trained
         | for the task?
        
           | rig666 wrote:
           | This isn't our field but its something similar. So say some
           | of your clients are old publications. Some have articles
           | dating back to the 1800s. Nearly all the work is digitized
           | but searching for something in the great categorized mess is
           | a nightmare. As most old publications are downsizing they
           | don't have the man power to curate there archives but are
           | inundated with research requests nearly 24/7. As a service to
           | help these publications maintain there image as an organized
           | informative keeper of historical records you could do the
           | following. 1. have an LLM make a series of tags for all the
           | articles. 2. make a summary for all the articles to improve
           | search results. 3. provide a service to them or up sold to
           | their clients were a question/prompt can be ran across every
           | article or a section of articles.
           | 
           | > how is the performance/cost of running vs more specialized
           | models trained for the task. most models are GNU licensed so
           | thats not an issue. But I imagine you meant the age old
           | question of hosting yourself vs using openAI. Truth is as of
           | now it currently is not foretasted to beat using one of the
           | less intelligent models on openAI. hardware cost alone yes
           | but Dev time is very expensive. Lucky were a small company &
           | our CEO sees this as training. Because LLMs are so new there
           | really isn't a large labor market for it yet. If our devs and
           | engineers get in this early then we can beat others to market
           | as the technology develops and new opportunities come to
           | light. on top of having possible HIPPA, GDPR, or other
           | security laws to follow that OpenAI has been very shooty
           | about, we do not want be at the whim of OpenAI or another
           | SaaS provider on a mission critical part of a vertical. They
           | have talked about depreciating old model. As well they have
           | had content changes in there models to placate political
           | critics, well not realizing that this pulls the rug out from
           | under developers that need any sense of stability from there
           | product.
        
         | andai wrote:
         | Cheaper than GPT-3? Can you give a comparison of the costs?
        
           | dbish wrote:
           | GPt-3 is very expensive if you use it frequently compared to
           | just running in a desktop machine you already have. Of
           | course, if you're buying new hardware just to run a model for
           | yourself locally, that's a different cost analysis, but for
           | me I had other reasons to have a decent gpu.
           | 
           | If you have a product that uses an LLM and can get away with
           | one of the open source ones, it's probably cheaper (and def
           | lower latency/response time) to host yourself too somewhere
           | like azure or aws.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | moneywoes wrote:
         | May I ask what your stack is?
        
           | rig666 wrote:
           | Nothing complex actually but it is a little messy and cobbled
           | together
           | 
           | I run oobabooga's API on docker with a 13B 4bit quantized
           | model. https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui
           | 
           | We use GTX 3060s because there the best bang for there buck
           | in terms of VRAM. Our current set up is mostly proof of
           | concept or used of inner office work well we work on scaling
           | to get a fluid handler built so it can distribute workloads
           | around the multiple GPUs.
           | 
           | Lucky the crypto mining community laid the ground work for
           | some of the hardware.
        
             | grep_name wrote:
             | > Lucky the crypto mining community laid the ground work
             | for some of the hardware.
             | 
             | Are you using riser cards to connect the GPU's to the
             | motherboards then? I thought about trying a setup like
             | yours, but was worried that the riser card interfaces would
             | create a bottleneck. Ideally I'd like to run some cards in
             | a separate box and connect them to my main computer through
             | some kind of cable interface, but I'm not sure if that's
             | possible without seriously affecting performance.
        
       | jmorgan wrote:
       | One benefit of self-hosting LLMs is the wide range of fine-tuned
       | models available, including uncensored models. A popular one over
       | the last weeks was Llama 2 Uncensored by George Sung:
       | https://ollama.ai/blog/run-llama2-uncensored-locally
       | 
       | A few more:
       | 
       | - Wizard Vicuna 13B uncensored
       | 
       | - Nous Hermes Llama 2
       | 
       | - WizardLM Uncensored llama2
        
       | thatcherthorn wrote:
       | I haven't tried self-hosting due to the hesitation around the
       | general drab I've experienced in the past trying trying to host
       | other ML models.
       | 
       | Find a repo. follow the install instructions. What is this weird
       | error? A library issue..? Maybe it's my OS..?
       | 
       | It always seems to be tedious compared to open projects in other
       | domains. Maybe that can't be solved.
        
         | smcleod wrote:
         | I replied to a comment in another post yesterday on this -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37120346
         | 
         | Honestly the easiest way that "just works" is to use LM Studio
         | which you can run locally https://lmstudio.ai/
         | 
         | Obviously you'll have faster results if you have a fancy gaming
         | GPU or something like the M2 Max/Ultra but you don't need those
         | to have a play and see if it interests you.
        
         | bheadmaster wrote:
         | In my experience, people specialzed in machine learning are
         | usually researchers and mathematicians, not engineers. Writing
         | a package that will work on any random person's hardware and
         | system is a non-trivial engineering task.
        
         | vorticalbox wrote:
         | I just use GTP4all [0] both the GUI and the python bindings[1]
         | 
         | [0] https://gpt4all.io/index.html [1] https://docs.gpt4all.io/
        
         | vorpalhex wrote:
         | Llama models have been pretty easy to host. StableDiffusion was
         | a real nightmare when it came out (and still is at times).
         | 
         | Using docker has an initial threshold you have to get over but
         | once you do, everything becomes very easy in it. How you end up
         | using docker matters very little once you get the concepts.
        
       | Slava_Propanei wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | Bostonian wrote:
       | ChatGPT is powerful, but it gives you different answers to the
       | same question from one session to the next. And research found
       | that overall performance can vary over time, sometimes for the
       | worse. So you may host your own LLM for reproducibility.
       | 
       | I have not tried public LLMs myself. Do they give reproducible
       | results?
        
         | embwbam wrote:
         | They do that on purpose. The API gives you a setting you can
         | change to 0 or 1 for maximum creativity or maximum
         | reproducibility
        
           | Makhini wrote:
           | Except it's never reproducible. It's a bug probably.
        
           | sp332 wrote:
           | That doesn't work for GPT-4 though.
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006224
        
         | varispeed wrote:
         | > it gives you different answers to the same question
         | 
         | Sometimes answer is wrong and then right.
         | 
         | If it is deterministic, then what if gets "stuck" on wrong
         | answer?
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | > I have not tried public LLMs myself. Do they give
         | reproducible results?
         | 
         | Public LLMs I don't know but images generated using
         | StableDiffusion are, of course, totally deterministic.
         | 
         | There really is no reason a LLM cannot be deterministic and if
         | it isn't: fix it (even if this comes at a tiny performance
         | cost).
        
           | mcbuilder wrote:
           | If you fix the random number seed virtually all LLMs should
           | be deterministic. However, just 1 token difference in the
           | input could produce a very different output, depending on the
           | sampler, model, etc. So, LLMs can be deterministic, but in
           | practice they are pure alchemy.
        
       | gdsdfe wrote:
       | I've been thinking about hosting my own LLM to see if I can hyper
       | customized it to me basically, kinda like an AI companion. My
       | main issue is building the hardware, there so much fluff in that
       | space, it's hard to know what to get and what works well together
        
         | ajcp wrote:
         | - Intel Core i9-11900KF 3.5 GHz 8-Core Processor
         | 
         | - Corsair H150i PRO 47.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
         | 
         | - MSI MPG Z590 GAMING EDGE WIFI ATX LGA1200 Motherboard
         | 
         | - G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory
         | 
         | - Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid
         | State Drive
         | 
         | - MSI GeForce RTX 3090 TI SUPRIM X 24G GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24
         | GB Video Card
         | 
         | - Corsair Carbide Series 275R ATX Mid Tower Case
         | 
         | - Corsair RM1000x (2021) 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully
         | Modular ATX Power Supply
         | 
         | - Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
         | 
         | On this setup I've been able to run every model 13B and below
         | with 0 issue. Even been able to fine-tune Llama 2 13B using my
         | own data (emails, SMS, FB messages, WhatsApp, etc.) with pretty
         | fun results!
        
       | talham wrote:
       | thanks for this article: any recommended links on HOW to host
       | your own LLM?
        
       | blackcat201 wrote:
       | I own my LLM not because I need it now but having the luxury to
       | fall back if openai ran out of money
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | It takes searching and experimenting to figure out what works,
       | and to avoid some of the sketchier stuff (and to lean towards
       | things you could legally use for a startup), but I'm pretty happy
       | with my current home setup, on an old PC with RTX 3090 and 64GB
       | main RAM.
       | 
       | 8-bit quantized _uncensored_ Llama 2 13B, doing 50 generated
       | tokens /second, using CPU+GPU including 17GB of 3090's 24GB VRAM.
       | 
       | I also have quantized 70B running currently CPU-only, but I might
       | later be able to speed that up with some CUDA or OpenCL
       | offloading.
       | 
       | This is on Debian Stable (like usual), albeit currently with
       | closed Nvidia CUDA stack, and necessarily with the closed Llama 2
       | that I can only fine-tune atop. (I'm hoping that some
       | scientific/academic non-profit/govt effort will be able to muster
       | fully open models in the future.)
       | 
       | One of the main reasons I picked Llama 2 was the relatively
       | friendly licensing (and Meta is earning lots of goodwill with
       | that). With this licensing, and the performance I'm getting, in
       | theory, I could even shoestring bootstrap an indie startup with
       | low online LLM demands, from a single consumer hardware box in
       | the proverbial startup garage or kitchen table. (Though I'd try
       | to get affordable cloud compute first.)
        
         | rig666 wrote:
         | Just a suggestion but they have 4bit quantified models that are
         | even smaller and faster that the 8 bit. Your average 13B 4bit
         | model is only about 8-9gb of VRAM. Using this I bet you can get
         | a much higher perimeter model on the 3090.
        
           | neilv wrote:
           | I was using various 4-bit quantized earlier, but decided to
           | go back to 8-bit for 13B, since I had the VRAM anyway, and
           | (at the time, for other reasons) was seeing some quirky
           | behavior.
           | 
           | 70B is currently 4-bit on this box, and once I have GPU accel
           | for 70B, I'll see how the quality compares to 13B 8-bit.
        
         | thrwayaistartup wrote:
         | I am about to start working on a non-profit project -- not a
         | startup, but similar in terms of resources dedicated to the
         | project and how we hope it will scale.
         | 
         | One of our big questions is whether it makes sense to rent or
         | to buy for training/finetuning/RLHF. The advantage of renting
         | is obvious: I don't think that this phase of the project will
         | last very long, and if it turns out that the idea is a success
         | we'll have no problem securing funding for perma-improvement
         | infra.
         | 
         | The possible advantage of buying is that we would then have the
         | hardware available for inference hosting. We do expect some
         | amount of demand in perpetuity. Having that ongoing cost as
         | small as possible would allow us to continue serving the
         | "clients" we KNOW would benefit a lot from our service with
         | minimal recurring revenue.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | talham wrote:
       | thanks for writing the article: any recommended links on HOW to
       | host your own LLM?
        
       | easygenes wrote:
       | I'm pretty amazed by how good 13B models are since they've gotten
       | the orca treatment. This new one released today has the best
       | evaluation performance of all so far and is in some ways
       | comparable or better than the original LLaMA-65b... a bit shocked
       | by that.
       | 
       | https://huggingface.co/Open-Orca/OpenOrca-Platypus2-13B
       | 
       | https://huggingface.co/spaces/Open-Orca/OpenOrca-Platypus2-1...
        
         | Timon3 wrote:
         | The model has also been quantized if you have less than 26GB of
         | RAM: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/OpenOrca-
         | Platypus2-13B-GGML
        
       | sourcecodeplz wrote:
       | I run Llama 7b with CPU only. It is fun when my Internet goes
       | down and I have nothing else to do.
        
         | kordlessagain wrote:
         | They are a bit of an "offline" network, in a way.
        
       | _pdp_ wrote:
       | You should run your own LLM if you can. Just keep in mind that
       | many hobby users simply cannot do that. They represent the
       | majority of LLM users - not the majority of power users. These
       | people will struggle to use LLMs without some technical support,
       | not because they cannot learn, of course they can, mostly because
       | it is not their priority. LLMs as a technology needs to be made
       | more widely accessible by making it open-source, so folks can run
       | their own instances if they decided to do so, but also hosting it
       | and providing it as a service for those who simply do not have
       | the skills or desire to run them themselves.
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | A few things holding me back for now:
       | 
       | - I use LLMs for code generation for a startup and they are not
       | competitive for that yet.
       | 
       | - Most of the popular open models are non-commercial.
       | 
       | - The only practical way I know of to get large custom datasets
       | for training is to have OpenAI's models generate them, and they
       | forbid this in their terms of service.
       | 
       | Having something that's truly open and closer to GPT-4 for code
       | generation will probably happen within less than a year (I hope)
       | and will be a game changer for self-hosting.
        
       | d_sem wrote:
       | Whether or not its "better" to host your own, the positive
       | effects from the open source community at trimming down the parts
       | of state-of-the-art LLM that matter and improving efficiency will
       | be good for the community.
        
       | edfletcher_t137 wrote:
       | I built a simple, asynchronous, serialized API on top of
       | llama.cpp for exactly this reason.
       | https://github.com/edfletcher/llama.http/tree/master/example...
       | It can run on low-resource VPSes even, if you have the patience
       | for CPU inference (which will take _awhile_ )!
        
       | garciasn wrote:
       | We host our own LLM because:
       | 
       | 1. We are not permitted, by rule, to send client data to
       | unapproved third parties.
       | 
       | 2. I generally do not trust third parties with our data, even if
       | it falls outside of #1. Just look at the hoopla with Zoom; do you
       | really want OpenAI further solidifying their grip on the industry
       | with your data?
       | 
       | 3. We have the opportunity to refine the models ourselves to get
       | better results than offered out of the box.
       | 
       | 4. It's fun work to do and there's a confluence of a ton of new
       | and existing nerdy technology to learn and use.
        
         | weinzierl wrote:
         | What is your experience with quality? Even if you don't have
         | the option to use a third-party LLM the question is if your
         | self-hosted solution is good enough so your users (employees)
         | will accept it. While you can forbid external solutions in the
         | end you can't force them to use your own solution - at least
         | not in the long run.
         | 
         | I'm very curious what your experience is? Do you think to self-
         | host is good enough so users will accept it?
        
           | garciasn wrote:
           | 1. We can and do disallow sharing of client and company data
           | with third party LLMs by policy and, yes, we can 'force' them
           | to use our product capabilities.
           | 
           | 2. We tested 13 and 30b parameter pretrained LLMs and found
           | them "good enough" within the confines of the original scope.
           | 
           | That said, we are expanding the use cases and with that comes
           | the need for increasing levels of quality. This is where the
           | self-training comes in.
           | 
           | We're fairly confident it'll meet our needs for now.
        
             | weinzierl wrote:
             | Thanks for your answer. I think I have to research this
             | further. I disagree with your point about forcing your
             | employees. Everyone has GPT as a comparison, if the
             | internal solution is a little bit worse it might fly. If it
             | is too bad people will not put up with it and if you force
             | them they will either ignore the internal solution or
             | leave.
             | 
             | EDIT: Or in the worst case ignore the policy and get fired.
        
               | garciasn wrote:
               | Getting fired could be the least of their concerns
               | depending on the nature of the data shared with third
               | parties.
        
               | weinzierl wrote:
               | I think a good example is Microsoft Source Safe.
               | Microsoft had the strongest incentive to use their own
               | product internally and yet even a company this size could
               | not resist the pressure in the long run to use a
               | marginally better product.
               | 
               | We will see how this turns out with LLMs and while I wish
               | companies were more concerned about what data they share
               | with third parties my experience is that apart from
               | military/intelligence related data everything can and
               | will be outsourced.
        
       | flemhans wrote:
       | How could you _not_?
       | 
       | I'm only waiting to have decent LLMs able locally to be able to
       | start really using them.
       | 
       | No way I'd feed my code, customer data, personal info, secrets,
       | emails, etc., to some dubious cloud machine which is already
       | excellent at exctracting valuable or juicy bits from what I'm
       | feeding it.
        
         | jonahbenton wrote:
         | +1
         | 
         | I have a little quip I use to troll people who say in effect-
         | but but contract law, your contract says your data is yours
         | even when it is on someone's cloud servers- I say- I know, I
         | know, but remember "possession is 9/10ths of the law."
         | 
         | I do believe in 99.(many 9s) cases no one admin with visibility
         | cares about any given customer's stuff but if they do and if it
         | matters, by then it's too late.
        
       | rmason wrote:
       | Just listened to Lex Fridman's three hour interview with George
       | Hotz this weekend. He spoke about his new company, Tiny Corp.
       | 
       | Tiny Corp. will be producing the Tiny Box that lets you host your
       | own LLM at home using TinyGrad software.
       | 
       | The tinybox
       | 
       | 738 FP16 TFLOPS
       | 
       | 144 GB GPU RAM
       | 
       | 5.76 TB/s RAM bandwidth
       | 
       | 30 GB/s model load bandwidth (big llama loads in around 4
       | seconds)
       | 
       | AMD EPYC CPU
       | 
       | 1600W (one 120V outlet)
       | 
       | Runs 65B FP16 LLaMA out of the box (using tinygrad, subject to
       | software development risks)
       | 
       | $15,000
       | 
       | Hardware startups are extremely difficult. But Hotz's other
       | company Comma.ai is already profitable so it is possible. I find
       | the guy extremely encouraging and he is always doing interesting
       | stuff.
        
         | doctorpangloss wrote:
         | George Hotz misread the NVIDIA Inception pricing as per unit
         | instead of as a rebate, believing the GPUs are 80% cheaper than
         | they actually are.
        
         | outside1234 wrote:
         | What podcast (or otherwise) was this?
         | 
         | Was it this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNrTrx42DGQ
        
           | rmason wrote:
           | Yes, that's the podcast I watched. He also talks a lot about
           | comma.ai which is now profitable on $5 million of VC funding.
           | I think that he has raised a similar amount of funding for
           | Tiny Corp.
        
         | bananapub wrote:
         | why are you valuing George Hotz (or Lex Fridman's) opinions in
         | this at all?
        
         | naillo wrote:
         | Imagine how many 4090s you could buy and run in a cluster for
         | $15,000 though
        
           | elorant wrote:
           | They seem to have six, either 4090s or 3090s judging by the
           | total amount of VRAM. How many more do you think you could
           | get with $15k considering all the other hardware costs? I
           | doubt you could make it more efficient at this price point.
        
             | heyitsguay wrote:
             | It might be tough to make more efficient, but $15k seems
             | exactly about the price of "stick 6 4090s in a decent box
             | and throw in a couple grand for my troubles", versus any
             | revolutionary hardware configuration. The way it advertises
             | running fp16 Llama 70B feels a bit contrived too, given the
             | prevelance of quantizing to 8 bit at minimum.
        
               | elorant wrote:
               | In my opinion the best hardware to run big models is to
               | go and get a mac studio ultra. You have 192GB of unified
               | RAM which can run pretty much every available model
               | without losing performance. And it would cost you half
               | that price.
        
               | qwytw wrote:
               | > without losing performance
               | 
               | But isn't M2 ULTRA over 20x slower than this thing? ~30
               | TFlops vs 738.
        
               | elorant wrote:
               | By losing performance I meant you don't need to quantize
               | the model a lot since it fits in RAM. My bad for not
               | clarifying it.
        
           | J_Shelby_J wrote:
           | I hate to burst your bubble, but more than two 4090s is going
           | to put you at BoM + labor costs around $15k. Especially if
           | you have to upgrade your electrical and hvac.
        
         | LoganDark wrote:
         | Is $15,000 really an "at home" sort of price?
         | 
         | (If money is no object, why not grab an oxide.computer rack?
         | Assuming you have three-phase power, of course...)
        
           | natsucks wrote:
           | Right, especially when it's not clear if such a machine will
           | be needed a year or two from now to run a model with the
           | equivalent performance.
        
             | hereonout2 wrote:
             | At this rate it may not be needed in a few months to run a
             | model of equivalent performance.
             | 
             | At work I've been successfully running llama2 variants on
             | Mac M2 systems with more than adequate throughput for small
             | experiments and examples. Can also boot a 4x Nvidia T4
             | instance on AWS (g4dn.12xlarge) to larger models.
             | 
             | I feel you'd need to be doing inference on a 24/7 basis for
             | at least a year to justify the price of this machine.
        
           | phone8675309 wrote:
           | A new car, especially electric, costs significantly more than
           | $15,000, yet people buy them and bring them home daily.
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | Does oxide do GPU builds? I thought they're classic server
           | racks (CPU)
           | 
           | > three-phase power,
           | 
           | Think for the tiny grad it's run off single, but for the US
           | the GPUs are power limited given the 110V grid.
        
           | d_sem wrote:
           | That's roughly the price of two original Macintosh computers
           | adjusted for inflation.
        
           | Me1000 wrote:
           | I don't think the $15k price tag is intended for regular
           | consumers. I didn't listen to the Lex Fridman interview (my
           | patience starts to wane after the first two hours), but I did
           | listen to another of Hotz's interview on another podcast, and
           | I believe he referred to this their "Tiny Box" as more of a
           | dev box. It's for the engineers and tinkerers who want a
           | capable machine for AI. So while expensive, it fills a niche
           | for those who don't want to deal with linking multiple Nvidia
           | GPUs together and deal with the power and cooling setup that
           | come with that.
        
             | Havoc wrote:
             | He's definitely thinking bigger than just dev boxes. Lately
             | he's repeatedly mentioned building own chips to be
             | somewhere in the future. How plausible that is is another
             | matter
        
               | Me1000 wrote:
               | Right, that's the long term plan. I'm speaking
               | specifically about the $15k first release of the tiny
               | box.
        
         | psyclobe wrote:
         | Think of it like an ac unit, they are expensive but
         | indispensable. I have always envisioned locally trained ai and
         | now it is happening!
        
           | Aerroon wrote:
           | You probably need an AC unit too if you're going to be
           | dumping 2000W of heat into your living space.
        
         | lawn wrote:
         | Why buy this instead of building your own setup with X 4090s?
        
           | gmerc wrote:
           | 144GB Vram vs 48?
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | And once you buy 6 4090s for 6x24=144, and add the other
             | components, you are not _that_ far off from 15k. The 4090s
             | are still a bit cheaper and with a more standard setup, but
             | it 's close enough to consider the alternative.
        
           | thatcherthorn wrote:
           | I think he mentions this in the podcast. One of the
           | challenging problems they're attempting to tackle is enabling
           | the build to work with standard 120 volt wall sockets. He
           | mentions throttling the system (GPUs specifically) to use
           | less power at cost to performance.
           | 
           | That and setting up the software to work w/ an array of GPUs
           | rather than one seems difficult.
        
             | Aerroon wrote:
             | I don't know if he actually said this, but power limits on
             | gpus do work. I've been limiting my gpu to about 60% max
             | power during long AI workloads and I lost about 10% of
             | performance. A 40% reduction in power usage seems
             | worthwhile.
             | 
             | It probably depends on your gpu though.
             | 
             | Undervolting would probably be even better.
        
               | robotnikman wrote:
               | same here with the 3090 I use. Power limited to 60% and I
               | barely notice a difference when experimenting around with
               | AI or playing games. Really good to use in a SFF PC
        
       | waffletower wrote:
       | I chose to self-host for a variety of reasons. One, I had been
       | using gpt-3.5-turbo for a hobby project and had an abysmal
       | accessibility experience -- I received repeated 429s with serial
       | requests far more sparse than the limits, at most frequent, 10
       | times less often than the recommended threshold. When I adjusted
       | further the 429s kept returning. It reached a point where even
       | llama.cpp models (on 20 cores) were definitely more performant. I
       | received absolutely no response from customer support despite
       | being an actual paying customer. I imagine OpenAI affiliates here
       | will downvote this, but I found OpenAI's API accessibility to be
       | one of the most terrible I have ever used.
        
         | justanotherunit wrote:
         | Where do you host your model? I am looking around on where I
         | can deploy one without ruining me financially.
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | The easy answer here would be either pure CPU at Hetzner
           | (e.g. a 24 core i9 with 64GB RAM for EUR84/month) or GPU at
           | lambdalabs (starting at $360/month). Or maybe vast.ai, if you
           | find a trustworthy offering with good uptime.
           | 
           | Though GPU workloads are still a point where building your
           | own server and running it from your basement or putting it in
           | colo can be very attractive.
        
           | Mernit wrote:
           | You could easily host your model on https://beam.cloud (I'm a
           | founder). You just add a decorator to your existing Python
           | code:                   from beam import App, Runtime
           | app = App(name="gpu-app", runtime=Runtime(gpu="T4"))
           | @app.rest_api()         def inference():
           | print("This is running on a GPU")
           | 
           | Then run _beam deploy {your-app}.py_ and boom, it 's running
           | on the cloud
        
             | bananapub wrote:
             | why did you decide to make such a bad pitch for your
             | product like this?
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | I have had similar issues with the Azure GPT-3.5, it would
         | respond fast sometimes, and just hang for minutes other times,
         | not even a 429. Just blocked randomly.
        
         | phillipcarter wrote:
         | FWIW, we've been live with GPT-3.5 turbo since May and it's
         | improved a LOT.
         | 
         | Latency is down consistently across the board and we haven't
         | seen a single "429 model overloaded" error in the past month:
         | https://twitter.com/_cartermp/status/1686894576202907651/
        
           | waffletower wrote:
           | It is worth noting that I had the perception, incorrect or
           | not, that larger customers were being given priority to
           | OpenAI APIs. It is good to see that you are reporting
           | improvements.
        
             | phillipcarter wrote:
             | Oh, they undoubtedly were. We have decent volume, but
             | worked very hard in our prompting to minimize input and
             | output tokens, so we don't have a big bill. I just think
             | that in the past months they've added significantly more
             | capacity and done a lot of work on their inference servers
             | to make things run better.
        
               | waffletower wrote:
               | Given Meta's obvious, and most welcome, open source play
               | with LLaMA 2, it behooves OpenAI to be performant and
               | accessible to everyone. For my application, I am finding
               | that 70b LLaMA 2 models are very close to the inference
               | quality of gpt-3.5-turbo.
        
             | hooande wrote:
             | It's gotten better for everyone in the last few months. It
             | used to be a nightmare, but I haven't seen a timeout or
             | rate limit error in a long time.
        
         | pmontra wrote:
         | How much are you spending to self host a LLM?
        
       | elorant wrote:
       | I self host an LLM (Vicuna 13b) for two reasons. One is cost, and
       | the second is privacy. I don't want OpenAI or any other provider
       | knowing what I'm working on because they could replicate it. I'm
       | not saying that they would considering that there could be
       | thousand of business cases for using an LLM, but why risk it. By
       | running it locally I have one less thing to worry about.
        
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